Clasificación del tejido

Now, some of you are making shorts to make people laugh (mostly your friends or family), some of you are making one to get your feature made, some of you are making one as a pilot to sell to a television network, and some of you are making one just to practice your directing chops with the hope of doing well and getting your name out there on the festival circuit and perhaps even getting distribution. All of these different motivations are great ones, and will require different budget ranges.

Your budget decisions will be dependent not on only what your story is, but also what format you plan to shoot on. This is why you want to research your film in its script stage so you know exactly how much money you need to raise to accomplish your goal. Remember the $3,000 it was going to cost me to have my actors talking and driving?

I always knew I wanted to shoot on 35mm. What I did have to back up that goal was two donated 35mm camera packages from Panavision, a bunch of low-cost film from Chris Russo at Kodak,

a great deal at Color by Deluxe (working with Charles McCusker Sr. and Marc Fishman), free locations, and the entire crew that worked for free, so my budget decisions were based on a very small amount of money that I’d been given from foxsearchlab and what I’d raised privately.

However, when I got to the pre-production table with what I thought was oodles of cash and an overwhelming amount of do- nated product, both Effie and Steak set me straight about how much things really cost even when you get a load of it for free. They didn’t deter my ultimate goals, but what they did do, as producers, was provide me with a fundraising goal to meet if I was going to get all of the creative aspects of my film accomplished. Their input was invaluable. That’s why your producer is the first person to hire!

There are several ranges of budgets for shorts. Later in this chapter you will get a look at some sample budgets.

● $0–$1,000 range ● $1,000–$5,000 range ● _{$5,000–$20,000 range} ● _{$20,000–$40,000 range} ● $40,000–$75,000 range ● above $75,000

The super-low-budget range ($0–$1,000) is shot on cheap video, self-edited, unpaid crew, you and your pals are the talent, self-sourced locations (your friend’s backyard). This is the film that many people think they should start with. I disagree. This is exactly the type of film I warn people against making because of poor production values and unqualified performances (unless of course you’re just making a short to throw up on a user-generated content site, like YouTube, to entertain your friends). Sure, there are exceptions within this budget range; just keep in mind that they are few and far between and yours probably isn’t one of them.

A great exception I’d like to note is the Duplass Brothers’ This

Is John. This was an eight-minute film made on video starring

one brother, Mark, shot by the other brother, Jay, in their kitchen, and self-edited. The film is a tribute to the meltdown some of us (Oh, come on! Most of us) have when recording our outgoing voice-mail message. A universal story, a pitch-perfect perfor- mance by Mark, appropriate editing and sound design made this a great one-act film. They made it after ten years of thugging it out writing feature scripts with little success, living in Austin, TX, in deep filmmaker depression (if you don’t know what this is yet, you soon will). They decided to get off the couch and shoot something. Anything. And it paid off. It cost them $3 for the tape stock (they owned the video camera and the bottle of wine you see in the film was an old empty one).

What works about this short, and others like it, is the fact that the medium (video without light package) matched the story (guy in a kitchen recording outgoing voice mail) matched the length (under eight minutes with credits), which also matched the bud- get (under $1,000).

If Mark and Jay attempted to make this film with four loca- tions, five actors, and a lengthy dialogue-filled scene with the same budget and production values, This Is John would have joined the ranks of the 4,400 other filmmakers who received rejection letters at Sundance that year.

The next couple of budget ranges tend to be where most short films should fall. I reached out to a prolific producer, Steak House (www .steakhaus .com), and she breaks down the budget- ing process of short films:

“What most wannabe filmmakers don’t want to know is that to make a high production value, well scheduled, confi- dent narrative short film you need a budget of about $20,000. That said, you can often rely on your producer or other crew members—sometimes even actors know someone who

knows someone—to help you get equipment and crew for free. But even with free crew, a 2–3 location narrative short with a solid camera package, professional actors, and crew runs at the very least $10k and then there’s post-production. And you should always be budgeting your film to include post. Once you move down from that number you have to start rethinking your script, number of locations, camera and light packages and where you think this film will screen. I’ve had many filmmakers hand me great scripts with unre- alistic budgets and when I tell them the truth about how much the film is going to cost they look at me like I’m lying, I’m an idiot or I hate them or their script and don’t want to admit it—six months later I inquire and find out the film still hasn’t been made or it was made at the budget I origi- nally quoted them.”

So you get it, right? Making friends laugh on YouTube? The under-$1,000 budget is fine. Not so fine if you want to showcase your skills at a festival with high production values, camera work, and multi-locations using professional actors.